An essential part of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is the definition of a refugee. A person must substantiate the alleged persecution on one of the five Convention grounds for persecution, which do not include gender. The Convention ground under which applications for the international protection of women are most often examined is thus membership in a particular social group. The latter is considered to be the vaguest of the Convention grounds, but there is consensus on some aspects of the definition. Today, it is almost universally accepted that women can form a special social group in terms of the refugee definition, as shown by numerous decisions of courts, acts of international organizations, and literature. The Master’s thesis deals specifically with cases of persecution in connection with which women are most often recognized as representing a particular social group. Problems that arise in case law in this regard are especially definitions of the term “particular social group” in national legislations and the decision-makers' reluctance to define the specific social group simply as women.
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